Her

All those goddamned songs. All of them. Brandy was a fine girl. Do you remember that son of a bitch who went to Boston for the springtime and kept on going? Yeah, I was gentle on your mind. Sitting here watching the dust settle after you had imprinted me on your brain like a well worn postcard, something to look at now and again. To remind you of the kind of woman who made no demands on you, while you lay next to the ones who did. Do you think I’m supposed to feel bad for Bessie or Big Momma? I can’t decide which. Maybe neither of them wanted him around all that much.

Him

I was no good for you. I let you go. Set you free. Set us both free. Set us all free of who I would become if I stayed. You didn’t try to stop me. You just stood out on that porch and watched me drive off. I remember the dead expression, and the white dress with yellow flowers. Bare feet and wayward brown hair. But your eyes. Good Lord, you could put a chill on a hundred degree day.

Her

Wish you had thought a little longer about what it means to be let to go. Mostly pain. I never wanted to be your muse for the one left behind. You remember the dress I was wearing? Go to hell. You were probably trying to write lyrics in your head watching me in your rearview. Is anybody anything but a song to you? Odd how you didn’t even mention the ten year old girl crying beside me.

I just can’t demand a person stay where they don’t want to be anymore. So many years I’ve spent waiting for that dust to pick up again, though.

You wouldn’t remember Ivy. Ten, that small but joyful girl, easy, with your eyes, standing by the edge of the road by the house holding that small guitar you bought for her. Holding it because she knew, she just knew you’d come back and teach her another chord, another little tune. There’s your song. Write that one, dirt road poet. But nobody wants to hear a man sing about abandoning a child, just a woman.

Children don’t understand the road. They don’t understand that strangers and stale beer and fights and cheap dirty hotel rooms could seem nicer to a man than sitting under a hundred year old oak, arms spread to welcome always, Spanish moss hanging down like a warm shawl on a grandmother.

No, you wouldn’t know her if you saw her today anyway. You wouldn’t believe, or maybe you would and don’t care, what happens to a little girl left that way. No more tears. Forever hardened.

Same for us, the women left behind, the weary muses. Never really the same. After years of wanting that dust to pick up on the road again. To hear that popping, that chorus as gravel and rocks run over grow louder and give hope, instead of growing softer and dying.

Him

I didn’t ask you to love me.

Her

You did! With every song. You left no room to not love you. When you were here, you permeated the air. You were this house. You were the whining hinge on the screen door, and the creaking of the floorboards in the middle of the night. You hummed with the birdsong. You howled with the dogs. You made every noise a part you, and it your sound. You were around every corner. You were every smile. In every breath. And with every note you sang with her. You took all those things and made them all contain your spirit. Everything in this place carries a note of you.

Him

Why do you have a need to not be alone? I’m not the only man in the world. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? You actually revel in being alone so you can blame your life on someone else. For such a quiet thing that can be in a house all day moving around to some music unheard by others. You seem to have no particular need to speak, or hear. So why are you so damned afraid of alone? Half that music in the house was in your head. Half that joy you remember was a daydream. You were alone long before I left and it wasn’t me leaving that made you that way. Yes, I wanted to go. But I was a character you were trying to fit into your daydream, and I never was good enough to be that version of me that you conjured up out of nothing.

She’s better off without me and you know it. Did you ever think that that hardened so, she’d never settle for one like me? Maybe you should thank me for showing her what sort of man to avoid. Maybe her bitter songs, yes I’ve heard them, so darkly written and woven through with that bittersweet art of anger so deep that it is the very face of wanting, wouldn’t exist but for the disappointment of me. You got nothing on the anger of a twenty year old child abandoned. She forged it into blades with words.

Maybe you were my muse. Maybe deep down I am hers. And she’ll traffic in the stories you have told her about a good man gone bad, a leaver, a son of a bitch, until she’s built a castle on my corpse. I’ve seen her. I’ve stood in the back and listened. God forbid I should tell her who I am and ruin her persona by showing her I cared.

I have a picture of you and her and I look at it every day.

Her

Burn them. Is that supposed to bring me comfort, that you look at a fading cracked image of me every day instead of dealing with the fading and cracked person that is actually here.

Him

Hate me all you want. Am I supposed to love someone who hates the very thought of me now. I’m tired too. I’m faded and worn too, woman. She left you behind and you let her. I bet you don’t make her carry this weight of disappointing you.

Her

Children are supposed to fly away. Children are supposed to leave you alone. At least she comes at Christmas.

Him

Well I suppose we’ve got that one thing left. I provided the story and you made her bathe in your misery long enough for her to become a tortured artist. I never sang nothin’ worth singing that wasn’t written by someone else. So you can enjoy that. You weren’t the muse you had hoped. I only ramble and make my way and try not to get into these sorts of scrapes. She took those chords and that guitar and used them as a wing to get away from both of us. I helped create her. You helped destroy her. You have to own your part in this. And she took the ashes and turned it into music.

Her

So we can both be alone listening to her sing about being alone. What a legacy.

Him

We’re all alone. Every last one of us. Some of us are just brave enough to own it.